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Ahlaam

Mohamed Al-Daradji

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A defenceless psychiatric patient is in danger of going down in the street violence of Baghdad, after the institution where she is staying is destroyed by a bomb.Ahlaam, or ?dreams? is based on the experiences of Netherlands residing director Al-Daradji, who found an unlikely chaos in his homeland after the fall of Saddam. He comes across countless psychiatric patients roaming the streets after the hospitals have been destroyed. Al-Daradji helps staff at a psychiatric hospital for several weeks and then,inspired by these experiences, films his first feature-length film in Iraq ? under highly unstable political and military circumstances. Faced with technical restrictions and great physical risk, the filmmakers are shot at several times and their lives threatened. In this madness Al-Daradji succeeds in depicting the story of a young woman, Ahlaam. Ahlaam finds herself in an institution after her husband was violently taken away at their wedding. When the institution is reduced to ashes by a bomb she ends up on the streets.